EVENTS

Shopping and baby Jesus

When Sarah Palin speaks, ad nauseam, of the “war on Christmas,” she’s referring not only to attempts to secularize the holiday season in general, but also the secularization of Jesus’ birthday itself.*

Hmm. Maybe she likes it provided it goes hand in hand with lots of baby Jesus and his birthday? Because Jesus loved capitalism and people who get rich by paying low wages, and because if God didn’t want the planet to melt then we wouldn’t have been intelligently designed to design them. Do I have that right?

That’s why this year’s annual anti-Christmas billboard by the atheist advocacy group American Atheists seems specifically crafted to make Palin’s head explode into a million pieces. The fifteen-second digital ad, which is currently running in Times Square, contends that the “true” meaning of Christmas is not Christ, but things like gifts, the Rockettes, and, most provocatively, Chinese food, which is what Jews eat.

“If Sarah Palin is under the impression that Christmastime is about Jesus,” Dave Muscato, spokesman for American Atheists, tells Daily Intelligencer, “I invite her to take a look at any shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving. Christmastime is, and has been for a long time, about giving gifts, spending time with family and friends, eating, drinking, and being merry; volunteering or giving to charity, and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with religion.”

But Daaaaaaaaaaave – a shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving is not Christmas. It’s black Friday! Everybody knows that.

Just to clarify, we did not have Sarah Palin specifically in mind when we put together this board. We had a meeting that lasted several hours trying out all sorts of ideas, which we further tweaked over the course of a few weeks. Her name never came up once.

While it is true that Palin has a new book out about the ” war on Christmas,” our message with this board is that you don’t need to be Christian to celebrate Christmas because Christmas is not really about Jesus anyway. In America in 2013, even Christians don’t list “going to church” as something they look forward to as a Christmas tradition. They say things like—you guessed it—spending time with their families, having a nice big dinner, giving presents to people they love, giving to charity, etc.

The quote from me about Sarah Palin was in response to a reporter asking me if the board was designed to make her head explode.

In theory, I have a facebook presence; in practice, I don’t know how to use it, nor how to navigate the landscape there (like finding them). But any reader here who wants to post it, and the link, has my permission and my encouragement to do so!

John Morales, I wouldn’t have known that without having to take the time to investigate, so I can easily believe that someone with a lot more going on in their life and the same “meh” attitude to Facebook I have could not be arsed to faff about looking for how their bizarre mutant GUI is going to work…:)

I haven’t logged into Facebook in months, having given up trying quite some time ago when I decided it wasn’t worth whatever I needed to do to reset a password. You could probably (I won’t) find out the last time I posted something there, and decide to be convinced or not.